THE MAJOR ISSUE
To the incidental character of the novel as a reflection of life we give great care; to its essential nature as a contribution to life we bring ignorance and neglect. How would we regard the critic who judged El Greco, Rembrandt, the African woodcarver by their conform¬ance with a set of rules of anatomy and geometry text-books? Would we not say : the artist who creates by means of physical forms needs knowl¬edge of physical laws, knowledge of physical structure. For it is of these materials that he articulates his vision and his form. But he is an artist inso¬far as he has a vision and a form. His knowledge of muscles, torsos, limbs, of spatial quantities is his knowledge of means. If we wish to know en- dogenously about muscles, torsos, limbs, we do not go to the artist . . . although we may go to men who have learned vastly from artists. And if we wish to understand intelligently the particular use which the particular artist makes of such matters, we must learn first what the artist wants to say and determine by that measure if he has used them well. The novelist's need of individual and social psychology is a pretty good analogue to the plastic artist's need of physical forms; the novelist's use of customs, manners, institutions, creeds, is kin to the plastic artist's use of the ways of mass and space. How comes it then that we think we have struck to the heart of the nature and reason of a novel when we discuss its psycho¬logical correctness, (its verisimilitude with our own idea of certain men and women) or its awareness of certain social problems? Of course, there is reason for this, but it is not as some of us doubtless would be pleased to ,have it, that this is a "scientific age." "Even in our fic¬tion," to quote the imaginary profes¬sor, "we look for serious discussion of fact and of truth." To whom I make reply: "In your fiction, you look for corroborating statements of your own particular brands of fact and truth— brands put up from previous creative contributions: which is quite another matter." It is not scientific .nor con¬ducive to the advantage of science, to judge a novel in terms let us say of its "psychological accuracy" or of its "faithful reflection of social reality." For to do this is to accept as an Abso¬lute Measure of accuracy and faithful¬ness the rationalized data of previous creators or groups of creators; and thereby to hinder the continuity of man's contribution to reality of ex¬perience which is, from the scientific standpoint, part of the function of cre¬ative art. Here as elsewhere the gap between science and art is truly the gap between false science and bad art. To be scientific about art is to be es¬thetic about it. Nor is it necessary to go back to Aristotle. Enough, as regards that very great man's Esthetic, to say that his meaning in the phrase "Imitation of nature" was determined by a posi¬tive and common animistic under¬standing of nature which included primarily the dynamic principle of the individual will and which most of us moderns lack : and that it was lim¬ited by an ignorance of the processes of the human Psyche which was ex¬cusable in Aristotle but is less excus¬able in Mr. Babbitt. . . . Let us skip to the nineteenth cen¬tury. German Romanticism and French Romanticism, by respective metaphysical and esthetic methods, brought new sentient worlds to the use of the evolving will of Europe. The hierarchic stuffs so satisfactory to Shakespeare, Montaigne, Racine, no longer served the creator. So Roman¬ticism ordered Receptivity to Material. All fields, all worlds, all "realities" ... from the innermost ego to the farther- most sea . . . became the stuff of ex¬pression. Despite the complexity of this and the intricate relation of the artist and the group, one can say di¬rectly enough that to the novelist this meant a simple thing: here once more was adequate material whereby he could express himself. The creator was as ever active and dynamic. The material, at least in the ultimate pro¬cess toward art, was fuel, symbol, means—anything but end. Now, after the creative act, came the Program. Balzac assured us that he was Secre¬tary to Society. Flaubert vowed that from his works the least personal taint had been excised. Zola and the Goncourt brothers discoursed on Dar¬win whoni they never understood and framed the Naturalist novel which they never wrote. For Balzac was the opposite of social secretary: he was the creator of dense organic forms to the making of which he kneaded the "life" of France as the baker kneads flour. Flaubert, as weak an analyst as ever gained fame for being a great one, was a pure and powerful intuitif : he was a true progenitor of imagism and of cubism: he made of Emma Bo- vary, Salammbii, Saint Anthony and Frederic Moreau successive expres¬sionistic forms of his own uncomfort¬able state in France. Only the disciples of Zola, whose names we forget, wrote Naturalist novels according to the program. And the trouble with them lay not with a program good or bad: it lay with their own lack of cre¬ative power. Now, during the propaganda pe¬riods of Romanticism, when receptiv¬ity to fresh material was a point to be fought for, the terms realist and naturalist as indicating acceptance of the romantic attitude had meaning. The fresh material of the romanticist became the reality of the realist. The realists, later the naturalists, were they who espoused and practised the romanticist esthetic. Correctly, there¬fore, realist and romanticist were one: and during the romanticist pe. riod alone did the word realism, ap¬plied to the novel, have sense as a de¬fining term. Moreover, in those rare cases where the romanticist will for new-worlds-to-conquer begot the fi¬nality of a new-conquered-world (a true work of art), the romanticist- realist ended in classicism. His work was classic. The whole lot of oppo¬nent terms equated into zero. Never are these terms with their old connotations heard today in France and Germany where they were born. They are still with us, where they are merely borrowed. Outside of this technical and relative meaning about which most of us are as igno¬rant as we are of the esthetic school of Egypt, realism as referred to art and the novel is as senseless a term as has ever been picked up from a junkshop. Every artist that has lived in the world is a realist insofar as himself is real and as his material, determined by himself and the world, must be real also. But no artist conceivable to man can be a realist in the sense of our critical implication—the sense of an absolute reality which true scien¬tists would not arrogate to mathe¬matics and certainly not to man. "It is the highest glory of man," said Remy de Gourmont, "that there is no science of man." Our standard of reality is an accumulating, gyrating and disappearing flux of subjective contributions. If there is a science of man, its name is esthetics, and its axiom: that each new contribution shall be gauged by the inner law of its own genesis. And here is an axiom that does away with ninety-nine one- hundredths of our "intelligent com¬ment" on novels that create char¬acters and discuss conditions "true to life." What happens to us is simple. Re¬ceptivity to material was a means for the creation of the nineteenth century Epic—an Epic which I am convinced is still in the pre-Homeric stage. That receptivity we have made into an End. The Continental Europeans are inde¬fatigable program-makers. They made a program of the liberating pro¬cess of the nineteenth century novel. We use that program like pedantic children to measure our own works and give them meaning: with the re¬sult that we rob them of what mean¬ing they have. Meantime in Europe, they have twentieth century novels— and twentieth century programs whereby to gauge them. Program-making is a vital part of the process whereby the social body more or less assimilates those new ex¬periences and forms of life which are literature and art. But program-mak¬ing must start from a recognition of the extra-intellectual nature of crea¬tion. The intellect does not create, it measures and brings up what it appre¬hends. The value of imaginative liter¬ature, even pragmatically as nourish¬ment to life, lies in the fact that it creates what the intellect—theory program, a priori standards of good, bad, right and wrong—does not as yet possess. For the intellect possesses what was created before. Hence con¬temporary art can never fall within the scope of pre-existing programs. And to judge the novel—its value as a con¬tribution to literature and life—on the basis of any given psychological or documentary measure of fact, truth, reality and the like, is irrelevant and absurd. This formulated problem of scope and theory concerns the novelist only indirectly; only insofar as he is af¬fected by the critic who, rationalizing his work on the basis of the work it¬self or on the basis of some forebear's work, either aids or clogs the process of assimilating the novelist's contribu¬tion to the sum of social experience. Let the novelist think that he is pri¬marily concerned with socialism, housing problems, psycho-analysis and the like. If he is an artist, his thinking will be but a detail of his work; and if he is not an artist his work will be but a negligible detail of his thinking. "From the beginning to the end," wrote Cervantes, "Don Qui¬xote is an attack on the romances of chivalry." With this mouse of a pro¬gram he produced his mountain of an epic, because he was a mountain—a veritable sea and mountain—of a man. The esthetic value of any novel is the end-product of its related elements of life. The novelist who deals with, and relates into organic form, elements of life, with whatever intellectual conviction, may create Beauty if he has that virtue in him. But the novelist who tries to deal di¬rectly with Beauty, get at it directly, short-cutting the elements of life, is doomed. The artist in the act of crea¬tion can afford to be anything rather than an esthete. But the critic and the public—let them look to their ways! Let them cease from studying a means as the end. Let them cease from parroting decayed programs. Let them not think that they have dealt with a novel . . . however much they praise it . . . when they have discussed its "psy¬chology" and its "documentary mate¬rial." (The term "psychological novel" has less meaning than the term "phys¬iological oil-painting.") We have a few true creators, cap¬turers of organic form—which is an¬other term for life—from the hinter¬lands at which mankind rekindles its fires and forges its tomorrows. And we have the perennial Mass—passive, indolent, like a woman fond of reflec¬tions, hostile to all contributions, since they mean renewal, effort, change. Which will the American critic serve: the dross of the Mass which is the Mass itself, or the spirit of the Mass which is the artist?